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Glenn Tamblyn (climateandrisk.com) and John Cook (skepticalscience.com) were among a myriad commenters apoplectic with rage about my article yesterday. Their outrage was because I showed that no American science academy, at least till 1979, gave the idea of the greenhouse gas theory the time of day. In fact it was never even mentioned in a key report to Congress that year. So much for ‘settled science’ I said.

But Tamblyn was having none of it. He thought he had gotten one over on me by citing a paper from 1967 by climate experts, Manabe and Wetherald. [1] Now that I’ve had time to read and digest that paper two things struck me: (a) How many times the authors mentioned the GHE. Answer: ZERO and (b) They found carbon dioxide cools the atmosphere and water vapor dominates the climate system.

Peppered throughout the paper on virtually every page were such water-related terms as ‘hydrological cycle’, ‘convective equilibrium’, ‘humidity,’ ‘clouds’, ‘water vapor.’ So much so, it was obvious that the authors understood the overriding significance of latent heat in the atmospheric system. Playing second fiddle in all this is radiation and carbon dioxide (CO2), which Glenn, like all other GHE believers, wants to tell you is a far more important climatic factor. Well, judging by this offering – his “best evidence” from 50 years ago – Glenn’s rather proved my point.

The big bombshell drops on Tamblyn’s argument from page 250 onwards where the authors admitted:

“If one discusses the effect of carbon dioxide upon the climate of the earth’s surface based upon these results, one could conclude that the greater the amount of carbon dioxide, the colder would be the temperature of the earth’s surface.” [emphasis added]Manabe and Wetherald also declare:

“In order to obtain the complete picture, it is also necessary to consider the effect of convection.” (p 251). They then go on to state, “The larger the mixing ratio of carbon dioxide, the colder is the equilibrium temperature of the stratosphere.”(p 251).[emphasis added]

Then:

“Generally speaking, the larger the cloud amount, the colder is the equilibrium temperature of the earth’s surface” (p 252). [emphasis added]

So, in short, they say CO2 and clouds make the earth’s atmosphere colder, while convection is a cooling process, and almost wherever you care to look not even one mention of any greenhouse gas effect – whether natural or enhanced by humans. PSI’s independent researchers will be pleased! As Dr. Tim Ball has adroitly shown many times, the GHE ‘Big Lie’ over global warming due to human emissions of CO2 only began to appear in mainstream science journals from the time of Margaret Thatcher’s speech to the Royal Academy, London in 1988. [2]

And as Tim’s colleagues at Principia Scientific have demonstrated, the only ‘heat trapping’ gas proven to exist in Earth’s atmosphere is water vapor – thanks to the miraculous properties of latent heat. No other gas traps heat. It is by the (non-greenhouse gas) phase changes of water vapor that Earth is able to enjoy such a moderate climate. It is the very reason why the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in 1951 finally dismissed carbon dioxide and the GHE as a possible factor.

The AMS assessed the greenhouse gas hypothesis based on the best science of the day. They found the consensus opinion was that there is no evidence of any greenhouse gas effect in our climate and it “was never widely accepted and was abandoned when it was found that all the long-wave radiation [that would be] absorbed by CO2 is [already] absorbed by water vapor.” [3]